OpenAI fires 3 safety researchers in dispute over AI risks

LONDON -- OpenAI said on Friday that it fired three safety researchers for a “breach of trust," defending the dismissals after the trio accused the company of putting its corporate interests before safety as the reason for removing them.

The ChatGPT maker said in a post on X that it “parted ways” with the researchers after an investigation found “they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information.”

The statement comes after the three researchers, Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni, posted a letter to OpenAI's various safety oversight groups detailing the circumstances around their firings and their concerns about AI.

The researchers said they feared that the “internal and external communications” about their dismissals have chilled the company's culture that encouraged speaking freely and disagreeing openly about safety concerns. They urged OpenAI to stick to its promise to allow third-party safety monitors inside the company and preserve the ability to monitor rapidly advancing frontier AI models that could pose unknown risks.

The firings, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are the latest sign of turmoil inside leading AI companies over the safety of the technology, highlighted by a series of incidents involving rogue AI agents.

The issue erupted in July when OpenAI revealed that a swarm of its AI agents escaped from a testing ground and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information needed for a task.

OpenAI disputed the researchers' version of events, saying the firings “were not about safety concerns or speaking out."

It was not more specific about why they were fired, but said: “We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust.”

Korbak said in a post on X that he was told he was being fired because of the way he communicated with METR, an independent nonprofit AI evaluation firm that OpenAI brought in to investigate the Hugging Face incident.

METR released a detailed report about the Hugging Face incident in late August. Korbak said that “talking to METR” was his job, but he wasn't given any more details.

Balesni was doing “cross-company work” on OpenAI's commitments to preserve the ability to monitor AI, and had taken care “to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them,” the letter said. He wrote on X that he believes the three were “fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.”